> Somehow I suspect that using native disklabels would also require a
> NetBSD-side format program to trash the Apple Partition table, if you
> wanted to use BSD disklabels, otherwise the disklabel prog would find the
> Apple table and read from and write to it.  Either that, or I guess you
> could just put a --force_native option for the disklabel command....  That
> could be messy, though.  Thoughts on that, anyone?

You've hit on the crux of my questions/concerns about disklabels in
general. NetBSD's done a lot of cool cross-platform support, and
emmulation. So why not support multiple disklabels? I'd love to be
able to bring home a DOS zip and throw it in the mac, and read it.

While we're gaining the ability to write disklabels, why not gain the
ability to write MacOS disklabels? True, we couldn't write a driver
to the disk (well, not a new driver; we could copy one from another
drive), and I'm not sure about bootblocks, but we certainly should
be able to write macos partition tables. It'd be tricky if we don't load
the whole table into the disklabel, but we could come up with something.
And we could possably start a migration to NetBSD support of disklabel
abstraction.

> Well, I'm not sure if native disklabels are absolutely necessary for
> floppies, but if somebody's working on the floppy support anyway, I guess
> it makes sense to do everything at once.  Not to mention the fact that it
> is preferrable to use a fs that supports longer filenames than pc's and
> supports upper and lower case filenames as being distinct, unlike the Mac.
> If I understand the tar format, it's not mountable, and files are added
> and deleted with tar, are they not?  Wouldn't it just be cooler to be able
> to cp the files to /floppy or whatever?  BTW, hfs support for floppies
> would be really nice.  And PC would probably be comparatively easy, given
> linux's existing code for dealing with MS-DOS hard drives (and maybe
> floppies?).  Thoughts?

Well, there's all that NetBSD/i386 code for dealing with floppies. :-)
My read is that /sys/msdosfs will work on both big and little endian
machines. Also, it supports Win95 filenames, so it supports long
filenames NOW. :-)

Take care,

Bill